Mycroft – open source voice assistant

Would love to read about experiences actually using this (I mean Mycroft in general) — good, bad, or otherwise.

Also, though: why don't we have "text assistants"? Seems to me the process of deciphering spoken text is (or should be) entirely orthogonal to performing the actual task — changing the lighting, cranking up the AC/heat, arming the security perimeter, or whatever.

I think the reason is that voice recognition is hard and so far only the "BIGASS TECH!!!" corporations have been able to make it "mom or granny ready" — and they have no incentive to do that for free and let us make our own mash ups. They want to wall us into their ecosystems.

So from that standpoint, this looks pretty cool to me — even if the voice recognition isn't as good as the big three.

OTOH, to rebut my own point: I got the new Apple Watch Ultra and I noticed that I can map the side button to a "shortcut" (the Apple term for a script you create yourself to automate something) that just transcribes whatever I say, and sends it as text over SSH to any host I want. On my local LAN, the delivery time is well under 1000ms.

So that's getting pretty close to being able to use Siri as a generic voice recognizer, and then piping the input into whatever arbitrary/homebrew system I want.

To do it purely with voice though you have to be like "Hey Siri, do the funky chicken" (after naming the shortcut "do the funky chicken"). And then say the actual command phrase you want your home automation to do.

I backed on IndieGoGo (in late 2018 I think), then helped crowdfund on StartEngine. I want so badly to speak well of these guys, and since I invested I want them to succeed, but it's been getting harder to do so.

They deserve credit for being reasonably transparent about their processes though. Their blog has been very interesting to follow. They had a ton of issues trying to work out their original design, then the pandemic hit. So in a way, timing has been bad. In the meantime they spent a lot of time on the software side, then on the fundraising side, then deck shuffling at the top, and now they're finally shipping something that looks nothing like what the Kickstarter showed. Instead of being close to the $200 price point they wanted to be at, it's currently $349, then will go to $500. They're at a point where if they don't get sales at those prices, they're not going to be able to deliver to backers; at least that's how they framed it when they discussed rollout.

They are actually shipping, though! Which didn't look like a guarantee for awhile. However, the reviews have been a bit lukewarm; [this][1] being an example. They had a way to make skills and they apparently changed it in order to better accommodate their final product, so it seems like there's been a bit of fracturing of the ecosystem as a result.

In conclusion: I'd love for you to support them! I still believe this segment needs a player like Mycroft, Mycroft can be that player, and I really want to not have my investments go to waste. But I 100% would not blame you if you looked at the company's arc and said "no thanks".

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Mycroftai/comments/yitzzk/mycroft_m...

This is actually how Mycroft handles it, more or less.

The wakeword ("hey Mycroft") is done on-device, but everything you say after that is sent to a speech-to-text API. That text is then routed to the appropriate skill to handle. So when you're writing the skill you only worry about the content of that text

https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/over...

They are: https://mycroft.ai/blog/hey-mycroft-listen-to-me/

Although it hasn't gotten better from my perspective. But until I searched for this, I was totally unaware they've provided an easy way to train your own model for the wakeword! https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/customiz...

I will have to try that and if I remember I'll update here if it improves my situation in a few days

> why don't we have "text assistants"

We do, it's called typing things into Google.